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Towards the R package sheldus, Part 1: Natural Disaster Losses in the US in 2012

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The SHELDUS database, short for Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database in the United States (http://webra.cas.sc.edu/hvri/products/sheldus.aspx), from the University of South Carolina, is a database on human and property losses from natural disasters in the United States. Data from this database includes County-level information on property losses, crop losses, injuries and fatalities from 18 different types of natural hazards (hurricanes, droughts, floods, etc.) from about 1960 to the present.

Pros

Data is free

Inflation adjusted losses are also available

Cons

Downloading the approximately 200 MB data (as of Nov 2013) from the GUI is tedious. There does not seem to be an easy way to download the entire data all at once.

Currently only one reference year could be chosen for inflation adjustment. What if someone wanted multiple years or wanted to update their data next year – they would have to download the entire data set again through the clunky GUI!

Sharing the data and analysis of the entire data is not easy because of its size and layout.